San Francisco Raises Middle Finger to America

Feb 13, 2004

You know, a lot of these pro-gay marriage activists are out there saying that their equal rights are being denied. Well, excuse me, but I thought Time magazine did a cover story not long ago that said men and women are different. They used to think that men and women and boys and girls were the same. No, they had to because they had a cover out there, said it was headlined, it was the cover. Folks, it was the cover, men and women actually born different, it said. Now, you have to understand if that was big news to the editors at Time then they had to think that it was big news, it was something revolutionary. It had to be that they thought boys and girls were born the same. And when the evidence was presented to them, no, boys and girls are actually different, they made that a cover story. This has been in the last eight years. It’s pretty recent.

So this whole concept of equality and equal rights, men and women aren’t equal in a lot of ways, they’re different. That’s why one’s called a bride and one’s called a groom. Marriage is about a man and a woman, we’ve been through this. But, you know, rather than go after the gay marriage aspect of this, there’s another area that you could sort of probe here and that’s San Francisco. Is it still part of the United States? Has the city seceded from California? Has it seceded from the United States? Do they have a new dictator for life out there, Generalisimo Gavin Newsom? One of the things, ladies and gentlemen, I pride myself as a highly decorated Hall of Fame broadcaster, it is my mission, multiple Hall of Fame member, by the way, it is my mission to make the complex understandable. Is that it, there are no more brides and grooms, only applicants? [talking to Program observer] That’s right, there’s no more brides and grooms, there are only applicants. there are marriage applicants. It’s only February. Yeah, do you take this applicant to be your lawfully wedded applicant? Okay, here comes the applicant, big, fat and wide, da-da, da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.

Anyway, I want to make this understandable for you, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t want to talk about marriage itself for a second. Let us just forget for a moment whether or not marriage should be limited to a man and a woman or can it be between applicants or fill in the blanks, whatever you want to call them. To me it seems much more useful and un-inflammatory to talk about liberals who see themselves as divine rulers. Here’s a mayor, admittedly a liberal mayor, Generalisimo Gavin Newsom, ignoring the law, ignoring 5,000 years of historic precedent, ignoring the will of the people. What do we have here? We’ve got a new nation that’s been carved out in the city by the bay. We have a new city, new state, whatever, we’ve got a flag up there, and it’s no longer the American flag. San Francisco has just raised a giant middle finger to America and said “up yours”!COMMERCIAL BREAKRUSH: John in Jacksonville, Florida. You’re next, sir. Great to have you with us. Thanks for the call.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush, and thank you for giving me opportunity. Let me say first of all, I’m very nervous. I’ve listened to you for, oh, 15, 16 years, you know, you’ve been in Jacksonville that long. It bothers me when I hear you discuss gay marriage the way you do. I think 30 or 40 years ago you would have been one of the same ones that would have been arguing the same issues with interracial marriage or a hundred years ago with the women’s right to vote. I wondered how you feel being grouped with those things, it’s not a far job to go from a racist to a sexist or someone else who just discriminates.

RUSH: Wait a minute. You know, I think that you are making a nice try at this, but you don’t have any idea, I was alive 40 years ago. I was 11, 12, 13 years old 40 years ago. I never had any objection to racial…

CALLER: May I have a question?

RUSH: I wasn’t alive a hundred years ago. You want to make these comparisons here and come up with all these bigoted terms to try to categorize what you think my position is, and I don’t think?

CALLER: I want to ask you a question.

RUSH: Ask it.

CALLER: Okay. If they were to call it a civil union, would you be for it?

RUSH: Yeah, I don’t care. Doesn’t matter to me, but marriage is specific. I don’t care who sleeps with who. I don’t care who lives with who. I don’t care diddly squat about that. But marriage is an institution that has survived thousands and thousands and thousands of years and has a specific purpose, it has a specific cultural purpose. Marriage is today being turned into a benefit grab, marriage is being turned into a way to upset the apple cart. Let me tell you what I think. You know, people are different, people are not equal. Men and women are different. No two people are the same. And this attempt at forced equality and making everybody the same in ways that they’re not is what bothers me. We have an institution. It’s called marriage. It is by definition for men and women to enter into. There are specific reasons for it that have nothing to do with denying anybody else anything.

Marriage does not exist and people don’t go into marriage to deny other people second-class status. Marriage happens to be a cultural, proven cultural way to create families and raise children. That’s the primary purpose of marriage. It’s the primary functional, cultural purpose of marriage is families and children and the procreation and so forth. And there’s simply some people who by virtue of their orientation are not eligible, not qualified to fit under, so what has to happen? I know this is going to really rub you the wrong way, but I want you to stop and think about it before you have a conniption fit. What bothers me about this, marriage as an institution that’s under assault anyway. It’s got some problems that have, you know, part of the cultural decay overall. There are some people who want to now get in on it for reasons totally unrelated to its purpose, and in the process the institution has to be weakened further in order for others to have their so-called equality. I don’t think marriage has anything to do with equality or the denial of equality to anybody. It is a specific thing, it has a specific definition.

CALLER: Rush, I think that we probably would agree, most of my friend and acquaintances do not want a marriage. They want the civil recognition and protections and equality that every other man and woman that come into a union enjoy.

RUSH: What equality?

CALLER: There are over a thousand laws that protect and provide benefits to those that are married that are not provided to others. Now, again, marriage is more of a Biblical moral issue, not a civil issue, and so there should not be.

RUSH: Well, see, admit something to me, then, admit something to me. Isn’t that what really bothers you, that marriage is a moral and Biblical issue and that’s what you don’t like?

CALLER: No, that’s not what bothers me.

RUSH: Then why did you bring it up?

CALLER: We are not ruled by moral writings, we are ruled by the Constitution, not by religious, sex, or ideologic things that come out of religious differences.RUSH: Uh, I disagree with you totally on the way you portray the Constitution. You know, right and wrong haven’t changed over the years. The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments. The Constitution has roots in law and morality. You can’t say that it doesn’t. The problem with so many people is that they want to change the definition of morality every so often so that it comports with their behavior, and that’s what’s happening to marriage. You know, what used to be moral is no longer thought to be moral by people who don’t want to behave according to that code, and so it’s sort of like the Constitution. If the Constitution leaves you out, it’s not your problem, it’s the Constitution’s problem, we’ve got to change the Constitution. And that’s what I don’t like. Everybody is running around trying to change the guardrail. Everybody is trying to move the guardrail that keeps us all ordered and on the road. Everybody wants to move the guardrail so we’re off the gutter or we’re off on a shoulder or we’re off somewhere, and we’ve got no guideposts and we’ve got nothing keeping the culture on the straight and narrow because we’re tearing away all the things that define decency and goodness. And we’re saying you can’t do that because you’re the majority and you can’t leave us out and you can’t tell us what’s right and wrong, so we want to modify the Constitution or modify these institutions so that what we are is normal and what we are is okay and what we do is fine and okay, and all kinds of different people are doing this, not just individual groups, and it’s one of the reasons why the cultural decay that we are in the midst of is occurring. It’s one of the reasons why the Super Bowl halftime show happened. It’s one of the reasons why MTV exists in its current form. It’s one of the reasons why kids are getting shot at school. It’s one of the reasons why nobody has any respect anymore, or there’s been a loss in the sanctity or the respect for life itself. We wouldn’t be having a million abortions a year if there was a seminal respect for life out there that there used to be. And of course we’ve got to now get the Constitution moved.You know, it’s very plain in the Constitution. We’re all entitled “endowed by our Creator,” I mean I don’t know if that’s the Declaration, but it’s still a founding document, endowed by our Creator to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. What we’re getting, we’ve taken care of life, because some people don’t have a right to life, both at the birth end and at the end of life scale, and we’re also taking care of the pursuit of happiness. Some people’s pursuits of happiness we don’t like and we’re doing away with those.END TRANSCRIPT